1. How do you find a good web freelancer? *(I need to trust them with my business and I don’t want to be taken advantage of)
2. Once I find a freelancer how do I manage him or her? *(I don’t know a lot about internet marketing or development so I wouldn’t know if they are actually executing on what they promised me?)

I decided to begin writing a series of blog posts to cover all of these topics in depth. My goal is to arm the small businessperson with all of the information needed to successfully find and manage a web freelancer.

Like hiring any kind of service-provider, knowledge is power. You obviously don’t want to spend all day researching and learning the business, after all you are hiring a freelancer to save you time and to gain his expertise. But, if you know the language of the business and the basic strategies involved you have a much better chance of having a successful relationship with the freelancer. The topics in this series will include:

Part 1: Internet Marketing Basics and Terminology

Before building a site you should have a solid marketing plan. Too often small business owners simply throw up a site before they have an understanding of its purpose. I will explain

• The importance of setting goals for your site and creating a long term strategy
• Identifying your target customers and understanding their behavior
• Understanding the internet marketing options available to you to reach these customers (SEO, local marketing, PPC, display ads, affiliate marketing, social media marketing)
• Why you need analytics to gauge your success
• Converting your visitors into paying customers

Part 2: Web Development Basics and Terminology

After determining the purpose of your site and the ways to gain site visitors we will move on to outlining and then building the site. I will explain

• The basic elements of a site – header, navigation bar, body, sidebar, footer, meta tags, additional elements
• The importance of wireframing your site before building it
• Site usability, following web standards, and understanding visitor behavior and flow on a site
• Creating a “call to action” to maximize site conversions
• The functionality you can build into your site and the amount of effort and cost that can be expected to build that functionality – CMS systems, site “widgets,” custom web development, etc

Part 3: Finding a Freelancer

Now that you have a general understanding of how a website is built and marketed it is time to find a freelancer to do the work. I will cover

• Where to locate freelancers
• How to determine which is the right freelancer for you
• Creating a project plan and determining milestones
• Determining what is a fair price for the work
• How to interpret a project proposal

Part 4: Managing the Freelancer

Even with the project underway there is still some management needed on your part to ensure everything is moving forward as planned. I will teach you

• How to ensure the work is being done properly
• The kinds of deliverables you should be getting to monitor parts of the project
• How to interact with the freelancer and ask questions without being annoying or distracting
• For the additional work that inevitably comes up in the course of a project, what is covered in the original proposal and what will cost extra

Stay Tuned!

I will be writing these installments over the next several weeks so check back for the updates. Or even easier, sign up to my mailing list to get emailed the updates (see signup form on the righthand side of this page).

If you are interested in retaining my internet marketing and development services or have any questions at all please contact me.

Unfortunately Google took away the “embed this” button, but there’s another way to easily accomplish this.

1. On the top right-hand side of your Google spreadsheet click “Share,” and “Sharing Settings”
2. Next to “Private” click “Change”
3. Select “Public on the web”
4. Copy the link in “Paste this link in email or IM”
5. Paste the link into this code:

   <iframe width='550' height='250' frameborder='0'src='http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkACervtJGhwdGpWY3MtMVh1cmxXcjFFdnh2UDc4THc&#038;hl=en&#038;output=html&#038;widget=true'></iframe>

6. You may have to add the part that says “en&output=html&widget=true” if it’s not already there
7. Then you can edit the “width” and “height” parameters to fit your page

That’s it. It’ll look something like this:

1. Smashing Magazine – I could pretty much stop the list here because there is enough useful information on this blog to keep you busy for a lifetime. It covers design, marketing, development, and everything in between. Very well written posts and tutorials!
2. Six Pixels of Separation – Innovative ideas on internet marketing. What I love about these guys is that they separate the fads from the useful marketing techniques. There are so many blogs out there talking about how important it is to just get out there on Twitter because “it’s awesome,” Six Pixels tells you why you should actually get on it and how you should go about doing it.
3. SitePoint – Sort of like Smashing Magazine but more content about marketing and less about design. It also has some good resources for freelancers.
4. Search Engine Land – One of the most popular SEO blogs out there. This is a great resource to skim once in a while to make sure your site is on top of the SEO trends. Personally I find that most of the tried and true SEO techniques (links+good content) have not changed much over the years but there are always little tricks and site-tweaks you can pick up from here.
5. New York Times Technology – If you’re only reading the up-to-the-minute blogs out there a lot of times you could be missing the bigger picture. NYT has some great articles about technology trends and the companies that are making it all happen. Not to mention, there’s also a great NYT iPhone app that lets me download the news so I can read it on the subway!

There are plenty of other great resources, but 5 sounds like a good prime number so I’ll stick with it. Also, between these 5 there is more than enough information to keep me busy. I feel any more than this would just be a distraction. Post your favorite blogs in the comments!

Developing in WordPress involves a ton of editing, saving, refreshing. If you’re doing this on your web-based install each one of those steps can take a full 10sec, meaning trying a few small changes that would take you 5min in Dreamweaver could take 30min in WordPress. As a solution, try out Turbo for WordPress. This caches all of your blog’s files to your computer, which means each reload goes much quicker.

It’s an easy setup and totally worth doing if you are in WordPress frequently. Just

1. install Google Gears
   
2. go to the Tools section of your WordPress backendactivate Gears, and you’ll see it caching your site.
   

I tested out on this blog and saw immediate speed improvements, and then quickly installed it on all of my other WordPress sites.

Do you have any other tools, plugins, or methods that speed up minor php/html/css editing in WordPress?

Starting a podcast is relatively easy if you are using WordPress to power your site, it’s just a matter of finding the plugin that works for you. Here are a few options and my experiences with each:

1. Podpress – I used it on a blog last year and it had a lot of bugs and a steeper than necessary learning curve. It worked and my podcast published properly in the end but I thought it should be easier
2. Powerpress – I am testing this out as we speak. In fact, check it out in action:[podcast]http://www.produceeverything.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/produce_everything-no_deal.mp3[/podcast]
   I literally installed this one and got it up and running in about 3min.
3. Podcast Plugin by TSG – not as original a name as the previous two, which is why I haven’t tried it out yet. I’ll be trying it out next and updating this post.

The nice thing about these plugins is that they include a sleek small mp3 player that is embedded right on the page. You just enter the url of the mp3 in the new “podcasting” section when you add a post, and the plugins take care of the rest (except for Podpress, which I had to tweak a whole lot). Also, when you set up the plugin in the first place it creates a podcast feed which people can subscribe to using iTunes or the podcast player of their choice. Here’s mine. Visitors can access the feed from their browser like any other feed.

What are your experiences with the available podcasting plugins?

1. Press This Bookmarklet – already conveniently built into WordPress, this allows you to make a browser bookmarklet to quickly post about any page you are currently viewing. You can locate the bookmarklet code by going to the “tools” section of your WordPress blog’s back end. Either drag the link directly into your browser’s bookmark toolbar or create a new bookmark and paste the link url as the bookmark’s link. When you are on a page you want to blog about just click the bookmarklet and a popup window appears with a basic version of the “add a post” screen already populated with the title and link of the page you are writing about. This is super-useful for creating more relevant content on your blog. I’m sure you are always coming across useful webpages, just use the bookmarklet, add a quick description, and submit. You can also create a new category like “quick posts” if you do not want these shorter posts cluttering up your main blog area.
2. New Post Bookmark – if you want to be quickly brought to the full-fledged “add a post” page just bookmark “http://www.[yourblog].com/wp-admin/post-new.php”. This is a simple but useful solution. It is also nice because you may not always want to write about a specific page as in Press This, but it also lets you start writing with one click.
3. Ping.fm Custom URL - if you don’t already use Ping.fm I highly suggest you try it. I won’t go into all the features but basically it allows you to keep all of your social profiles up to date in one shot. I currently have it set up to update about 15 of my sites every time I make a status update, way more realistic than updating each one every time I do anything. Ping added a new feature that lets you update custom (non-socialmedia) sites right from their interface. After you create your Ping profile just add “custom url” and then install this plugin on your WordPress blog. Setup is hassle-free and takes no more than 10min. So now along with updating your social media profiles you can update your blog. Also check out the Posting Groups which allows you to post to, for example, your WordPress blog, your Posterous, and your Tumblr at the same time. Ping also has a nice mobile version that lets you update on the go.

These WordPress posting solutions are not mutually exclusive. Each method has its own benefits depending on the situation you are in at the time. Try them out and comment on how you like them.

Do you have any other methods of posting quickly on WordPress?

After spending the time building a flash MPC2000 drum machine that plays my songs [LINK], I decided I might as well use my new skills to build an interactive flash resume. There are many benefits to an interactive resume such as this:

• Demonstrate your design skills
• Show your creativity and “thinking-outside-the-boxedness”
• Learn some new flash skills – it’s inevitable that you will pick up new tricks any time you do a new project such as this

There are some problems inherent in a flash-based resume. Namely, most prospective employers, if they are not hiring you for a design-specific job, don’t care to see an interactive resume. They want to see a traditional format resume, that fits in the pile with the other resumes. There is nothing wrong with this, they have job to do, to sift through the pile. This is why I recommend adding a link within your resume’s url to a .pdf version of your resume.

The other drawback, and as a search marketer I preach this often, is that flash is not a very search-friendly medium. It is getting better as Google algorithms improve [link]. It is still another reason to offer an alternative version of the resume based in html.

So, I decided Flash would be the best avenue – despite the fact that I didn’t know flash at all. I had seen my roommate design in Flash and I though it would be no problem. My idea was to make an MPC drum machine that will allow you to play the drum machine using your computer keyboard. Also, if you click on each pad with your mouse it will play one of my songs. Seemed like an easy idea at the time, but as a total beginner it was a long development process. This turned out to be a great project to get a good understanding of Flash and have a good time doing it.

Here’s a (very) quick rundown of how I developed it:

Read a bunch of tutorials on Flash design. Started out with a stock picture of an Akai MPC2000 and Photoshopped my logo over theirs. Imported the image to Flash.

Added buttons to each drum pad on the pic. Wrote actionscript that triggers a different drum pad sound on a mouse hover. Assigned each of the drumpads to a keyboard key. Wrote actionscript to trigger a different song for each pad on mouse click. Actionscript for play, stop, volume, MPC displaying the song titles, etc.

And there you have it, no you can build your very own custom flash drum machine/streaming music player! JK, it wasn’t that easy, and I don’t have the time to write about all the development steps here. If anyone is actually interested in learning the ins and outs of this please feel free to drop me a line and I’d be glad to help.

Now have fun with a version of the drum machine below, or play the full sized version at my DJ Chima site homepage. It’s easy to use, just hover over “instructions” to see how. And as with any flash module, you have to click anywhere on the picture in order for it to let you use your keyboard keys to play the drum pads.